Tag Archives: Crypt of the Sorcerer

Time to give those Harpoon Flies another shot… 5. Dead again. Okaaaaay, roll again… 2. There. Now we may proceed. If we had rolled a 3 or a 4 we would have survived as well, although with a loss of 6 Stamina and 2 to our Skill (!) AND we would be forced to drink one of our doses of healing potion (and be denied it’s Stamina restoring effects). As it stands, we only lose 4 Stamina and the dose of potion.

I think of these kind of encounters as Gatekeepers. They lie along the One True Path and must be negotiated. The Harpoon Flies are a particularly egregious example. They present a significant chance at instant death (if we were playing fairly we would have had to roll three new characters in the space of about ten minutes), they hit our stats by a not insignificant amount even when the roll goes our way, and worst of all is that we have no agency when dealing with them. It’s entirely up to the luck of the roll. No choice or item or character stats has any bearing on the encounter. We’re not even given the satisfaction of resolving combat. If choice is the heart and soul of the gamebook experience then the Harpoon Flies are the ultimate sin. They disregard the core of the format in favor of a bit of randomness.

Of course we could chose to avoid the flies altogether (and considering that even the best outcome of the encounter results in a penalty, a ignorant player might deduce that doing so is the correct course of action), but that would just doom us later on. As we replayed and learned the shape of the book we would find that a meeting with the flies is inevitable.

I wrote I would post more about gamebooks, and then I didn’t. I’ve been playing through the Windhammer entries. There’s some good, some bad. I have lots of thoughts about them. But as a competitor I feel like I should wait until the competition has concluded before I start making my opinions public. If you are interested in criticism right now, Crumbly Head Games is doing daily reviews.

There’s a lot of gamebook playthrough blogs out there and they’re always fun to read. The seats on that bandwagon look mighty comfy, so I figured it might be fun to try one myself. And what better place to start than the infamously difficult Fighting Fantasy entry “Crypt of the Sorcerer?” Known as the most difficult Fighting Fantasy title, the last encounter has something like a 5.5% percent chance of success. And that’s not counting the punishingly narrow correct path, dozens of lucky rolls needed, and masses of unfair encounters en route to the end boss. Sounds like fun!